It wasn’t until they were seated cattycorner across from each other at the table, her against the wall, him not, eating steaks and salad, that she said, “The car pulled in half a block down from here. The driver got out, and people greeted him. I’m going under the assumption he was looking for the right slot.”

  Good. His stomach allowed more room for the food he’d been forcing down.

  “I checked in with Glen as soon as I heard the greetings down the way,” she said then, and he slowed down his chewing as he read the serious expression on her face. “The front gate and pillars of your home were vandalized. Someone left you a spray-painted message.”

  It had only been a matter of time. Was just a stucco cement wall and metal privacy gate, both of which could be repainted. “Which was?” he prompted when she didn’t dish.

  “‘Leave or die. We don’t want you here.’”

  Chin jutted, he nodded. Carried his plate to the counter, disposed of the uneaten food, rinsed his dishes, put them in the dishwasher and excused himself to bed.

  There were some things a guy had to deal with outside the company of a woman he was starting to admire far too much.

  * * *

  The feel of Joe Hamilton’s hands on her hips should not have been what kept McKenna awake. And shouldn’t have been what she’d dreamed about, either. She might have worried more about both if she hadn’t seen a shadow on the camera app during her 4:10 a.m. check.

  Up and off the couch, in the pants and shirt she’d slept in, she slid into her shoes as she enlarged the one camera. Took a screenshot and continued to watch.

  Someone was outside their rig. Not far from the grill. Down on hands and knees?

  Could it be an animal? Brought in by the scent?

  Yeah, they were in town—a small one, in a park—but the surrounding area was all mountainous desert. A mountain lion?

  As she watched, the figure rose and she retrieved the gun she generally wore holstered to her ankle from under the pillow next to where she’d been sleeping.

  If the intruder was animal, it had to be a bear...

  Out of sight of the camera.

  Stepping stealthily, so the rig wouldn’t show any movement, she got to the side of the door, peering out the window. Phone in one hand, gun poised in the other. She didn’t have eyes on the intruder.

  Not by camera, or through the window. He seemed to have just disappeared.

  Enlarging all seven of the other cameras, she checked, one by one, looking for any sign of occupation, but saw nothing but the same cleared area she’d been watching for nearly twelve hours. Back to camera one—and nothing.

  She hadn’t imagined movement out there. She had the screenshots to prove it. And, glancing toward the back of the rig, knew she had to wake up Joe. She’d taken a couple of steps in that direction when he came stumbling through the bathroom, still buttoning the shorts he’d obviously just pulled on.

  He didn’t make a sound, but his expression said plenty. Wanting to know what was going on.

  Motioning him down below window level, she crouched and met him at the table, showing him the images on her phone.

  “I’m going out to take a look,” she barely whispered. “Stay low.”

  When he shook his head, she raised her brow, and, with a resigned look, he nodded. Either he let her do her job, or she’d be gone.

  It was the silent message she sent him. She assumed his acquiescence meant he got it.

  McKenna unlatched the door slowly, silently and, inch by inch, eased outside, taking in every bit of space she could see. The park was well lit, even at night, but with dark rigs on all sides, there were still plenty of shadows in which someone, or something, could be hiding.

  A sound behind her had her swinging with one breath, heart pounding, gun pointed, and she saw the rig behind them dip, as though someone had just climbed up inside.

  A middle-of-the-night trek to the public restroom facility?

  Or their intruder? Turning around more slowly, gun still held out in front of her with both hands, she did a thorough check of their site and was about to head back inside when she saw something move on the windshield of the car.

  A piece of paper, brown, as it turned out when she retrieved it. Couldn’t make out any messaging in the darkness, but as her toe caught on the wheel of the car, she noticed something else.

  The tire was flat.

  Both front tires were flat.

  Watching on all sides, she hurried back inside the rig. And saw Joe, fully dressed, already packing up the kitchen by the light of one small battery-operated lantern.

  While she itched to check out the rig next door, she couldn’t waste the time. Her job was to stay with Joe. To assess current danger to her client. Not catch a tire slasher.

  She carried the paper over to him, holding it out so they could huddle together and read it by the dim light.

  The picture jumped out at her. Throat tightening, she studied the copied image from a popular social media site, including side-by-side likenesses of Joe. The short-haired, clean-shaved, business-suited shot that had been plastered all over the news, and a more recent version of long-haired, bearded Joe, in a pair of shorts she hadn’t seen. The side of the legs were pocketed.

  “When was the last time you wore those shorts?” she asked quietly.

  “Three or four days.”

  Breathing a tad easier, she nodded. And started to read the inked and somewhat uneven note. “We don’t need no liars and cheats here. Leave now and I won’t respond to this post.”

  Moving closer, she barely made out the post itself. But she got the gist of it. And the hashtag, #wheresjoenow. Someone had moved the hunt for Joe from the dark web to social media.

  “Go shave,” she said, following him back toward the bathroom to veer to the laundry side of the small space. She’d seen a small container of bleach there with some other household products.

  “All I have are these trimming scissors to cut my hair, but we can get some...” He held up the small cutters he was using to cut his beard down, collecting the hair in a trash bag, before shaving. The single-blade travel razor and little can of shaving cream were going to be a challenge.

  She shook her head, pretending that she didn’t notice that she was standing in the bathroom with a man performing personal ablutions.

  A man she was finding harder and harder to keep at a personal distance.

  “We need to leave your hair long, but we’ll bleach it. I did this once, when I was younger, and while I don’t recommend it, for various reasons, it works. I just need to mix some shampoo in with a little bit of bleach.” She moved to the kitchen, grabbing a plastic container they could throw away, all the while instructing him on putting on clothes he wouldn’t mind discarding and draping his shoulders with a towel that he could do without.

  She chattered to keep her thoughts from wandering off on her. She was pretty certain there was no immediate threat to Joe’s life—the photo let them know that someone knew who Joe was, but the slashed tires were more in line with the words on the note. A warning rather than an immediate threat. They’d been given time to move on. And with adrenalin still pumping, with imminent danger gone, she was too aware of the man whose intimate habits were becoming far too familiar to her.

  By the time he was shaved and ready for her, she’d put away her bedding, moved in the slides and brushed her teeth and washed her face at the kitchen sink. Draping the floor with a sheet, she had him sit on an also-covered kitchen chair, put the rubber gloves she’d found under the kitchen sink, on her hands and grabbed a comb.

  “We’re only going to leave this on for a couple of minutes,” she told him, imagining herself as any other hairdresser or barber he’d visited over the years. Nothing intimate about that. Just business. She couldn’t even feel his hair with the rubber between her fingers and the long strands. It took her far too long to comb in the bleach. A good five minutes of keeping her mind occupied on tasks ahead, and off the shoulders the backs of her hands kept bumping into.

  He never said a word through the entire process. Just sat there, leaving her to imagine what he was thinking. How he could possibly be feeling.

  “Okay, rinsing’s going to be a treat,” she said, words forced as cheerfully as she could push them through her tight throat. Wanting to blame the bleach stench for the tightness, but knew she’d be lying to herself if she did.

  “The only space big enough is the shower.” It was a tiny combination unit with the tiniest tub she’d ever seen. But as a sink, it would do fine. “Sit down and lean your head back. We can’t let any of this touch your skin.” She handed him a thick towel. “Keep this over your eyes at all times.”

  Kneeling down beside him, she turned on the water, decided lukewarm was better than waiting, and, leaning over him, concentrated on getting the poisonous cleaning agent out of his hair without burning or otherwise hurting either one of them.

  The entire project almost went to hell in an instant as, leaning to reach the ends of the long strands on the back of his head, her breast brushed up against his chin.

  She jerked. He coughed.

  She slipped, fell forward and, catching herself in the tub with both hands, left him face-planted between her breasts.

  Chapter 8

  Joe’s arms closed around her by pure instinct. Catching the weight of her upper body with his face and neck, he sat upright, holding her tight.

  For a split second, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. It was a light place, a warm place, and the scents were a mixture of glorious floral woman and...bleach.

  And the softness. His face nestled into it—and the split second was over. His nose. McKenna’s breasts.

  He pulled away from her as voraciously as she drew apart from him, and the knee that she’d been resting on landed in his lap, just missing his misters.

  The erection was there, though, pressing against her upper leg, for the second or two it took her to stand up and get out of there. The water was running, his hair was dripping and Joe sat, giving his body a second to recuperate.

  Giving his good sense a chance to return.

  And his heart to calm down.

  “You need to wash your hair,” she called from the front room, her voice sounding so odd he might have thought someone else was in the rig with them if there’d been even a realm of possibility of that being the case. “Fast,” she called out. “We need to roll quietly out of here before daybreak.”

  Those last words shrank his penis and stole all good feeling from his being as reality slammed him twice over. The woman who’d just ignited him believed him to be guilty of fraud, among other things. And he was being stalked on social media.

  The fates that had borne him into the life of a criminal, the fates he’d eschewed by making good, had to be rolling in laughter.

  Choking back the anger, the hopelessness, the bone-deep sadness that hit him, Joe washed his hair.

  He was not going to let the dark side win.

  * * *

  They were heading southeast, still in Arizona, on another two-lane highway through the middle of vast nowhere. Unending brush, cactus and furry Joshua trees, all landscaped with mountains on the horizon, flew by in flurries of browns and muted greens with the flashes of the various purple, orange, red and white flowers that brought the desert to life beneath the state’s almost constant blue skies and sunshine.

  Predawn had moved through dawn and into early morning. McKenna wanted them out of town and lost in the desert before the area they’d been in came to life. Just in case their vandalizer did not keep his word to remain silent about Joe’s identity.

  So much for her thought that they could get lost in plain sight.

  She’d handed Joe a rubber band when he’d come out of the bathroom with blond-streaked hair, telling him his heading into the next phase of his life would be ponytail style. He’d pulled the hair back without a word. Moved on to ready the rig for immediate travel.

  While she’d been left thunked in the lower region at the sight of him—clean shaven, hair pulled back from his face—whew. She’d been fighting attraction when he’d been hidden from her, but with his eyes and mouth right there...in full view...

  She was slightly poleaxed.

  Noted and would be guarded against. She’d given herself a bye on the first look and would prevent any further such reactions in the future. Knowledge was her tool. And the key to her defense.

  Billboards started to appear, announcing a small town ahead, with a big box store, and she had Joe pull off long enough for them to run in and get him a pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses with only glass for the lenses.

  And she got hit again. Who knew glasses did it for her?

  That was new.

  Joe also picked up a tire-repair kit. They had a full-size spare and he’d seemed confident that he could fix the other, less deeply damaged tire, as there was still a lot of air in it. Deeply surprised that he’d know anything about tires, or changing them himself, she was also relieved that they weren’t going to have to spend time hanging around an auto shop.

  Back on the road within minutes, she turned on her phone to check in with Glen. Chances were good that since the photo that their middle-of-the-night stalker had exposed to them had been taken prior to McKenna’s advent into his life, it wasn’t yet known that she was with him.

  She heard the click of Glen’s phone, took the breath she needed to get out her urgent message and was cut off with his “McKenna, get him out of public view.”

  “Done.” She told her boss about the slashed tires and photo. “The fact that he slashed the tires that ride up on the tow bar trailer, allowing us to leave without needing to get them repaired, tells me that he really did just want us gone,” she added, something she’d come up with during the couple of hours they’d been on the road.

  Maybe because she was trying to find ways to keep Joe’s spirits up.

  She hoped not.

  His spirits weren’t her issue. His bodily safety was all she’d been hired to oversee.

  “One of the team members is tracking the social media posts, attempting to get back to the original poster, but with instructions to everyone to copy and paste the post themselves, it’s taking a while,” he told her. “We’ve been on it since last night, when Hud was first notified of the posting. The #wheresjoenow hashtag has over seven hundred thousand hits.”

  She specifically did not glance at Joe.

  “In one day?”

  “We’re seeing a slew of what appear to be new profiles, along with a mixture of profiles of the rich and powerful, and a couple of influencers have now picked up the post as well.”

  The only relevance to her in the turn of events was that in order to keep Joe safe, she had to keep him out of sight. They had provisions for a couple of weeks. But she was going to have to learn how to drive the rig, with him in the back with blinds drawn, and to gas up and dump and refill holding tanks.

  They’d be fine.

  “We’ve got other developments, Ken.” Glen’s tone warned her before his news came at her. “Bellair is cooperating fully with our investigation. They want their reputation fully cleared. Last evening, Hudson’s team found a virus in the return-reporting software. It triggered returns of a couple of projects to hold reporting for six months, and then do a full dump all at once.”

  Okay. They were at least getting somewhere. Glen went on to say why the problem hadn’t been discovered sooner. Something to do with the expertise involved in the discovery. And some to do with the fact that prosecutors and investigators had been set on proving Joe guilty, not solving Bellair’s company problems.

  “The virus originated from Joe’s computer.”

  Not a good development for Joe.

  And not her concern.

  “Do you want to talk to him?” she asked, keeping her tone neutral.

  “Not yet. And we don’t want you to say anything, either, as it’s a conversation we’ll want to have fresh with him. Hud wants to do some more looking, first, so we know what we’re taking to him.”

  Which meant what? That the firm’s partner thought there was a chance someone else had used Joe’s computer? Or Glen wanted irrefutable proof before they fired him as a client?

  The thought followed immediately with another. She didn’t want him fired. No way she was going to just walk away from the man while he was being hunted like an animal. Or leave him to fend on his own in hiding...

  Because...that would be inhumane.

  He’d been found not guilty. What he did or didn’t do before, and what he did or didn’t need to do to make amends, was on him. His karma.

  But what was happening to him in the aftermath...just wasn’t right.

  If people had beefs with him, they had to take them up in civil court. Or find something else to charge him with.

  Stalking was against the law.

  Threatening someone’s life even more so.

  And it felt like a crime to hang up the phone and not tell Joe about the newly discovered virus that explained how the returns portion of his problem had happened. A virus originating from Joe’s computer. Her boss had given her a direct order—in as many words—and her loyalty had to come first for the firm for which she worked, the firm that was paying her, the job she’d agreed to do—not to the man who could be a criminal sitting next to her.

  But her heart...it wondered who was loyal to Joe?

  * * *

  He could think of worse things than being out in glorious country, periodically driving through mountains with views that most only got to see on expensive vacations. The desert expanses were good, too, in a more peaceful way.

  And the view inside his rig, sitting just a couple of feet away in the captain’s chair passenger portion of the cab...he wasn’t in any way ready to be done with that.